Friday deep thoughts

Mountain ash tree in our backyard

Maybe the only thing that is really true right now is that we are all alive. If I'm sitting here typing this, and you're reading it, we each have a pulse, and I can press a finger to my wrist and feel it. We're breathing. In. Out. In. Out. I can feel the keys under my fingers, I can see the cat sleeping next to me on the sofa, I can hear traffic in the distance through the open window, faintly taste the granola I had for breakfast. Maybe that's where we start. 

If you've been around for awhile, you've seen the quote below, because I think this is at least the fourth time I've posted it. It's my favorite quote from Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzburg, and one of my touchstones since I first read it a dozen years ago: 

"Faith does not require a belief system, and is not necessarily connected to a deity or God, though it doesn't deny one. ...faith is not a commodity that we have or don't have-- it is an inner quality that unfolds as we learn to trust our own deepest experience.... No matter what we encounter in life, it is faith that enables us to try again, to trust again, to love again. Even in times of immense suffering, it is faith that enables us to relate to the present moment in such a way that we can go on, we can move forward, instead of becoming lost in resignation or despair. Faith links our present-day experience, whether wonderful or terrible, to the underlying pulse of life itself."  -- Sharon Salzburg, in Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience

"The underlying pulse of life itself." 

Have a great weekend. 

Dentists and shaming and another book on racism (too long)(again)

1. The dentist we'd been going to for years retired a couple of years ago. The younger dentist who bought her practice seemed perfectly competent, but every time I went in for cleaning or a checkup, I left feeling demoralized and shamed. She was very good at a sort of patronizing disdain that made me feel like my lack of perfect teeth was a moral failing. I thought it was just me being hypersensitive, as usual.

But after Dean and MadMax, without prompting, reported that they were starting to dread going to the dentist because she was so negative, we finally decided to switch. We love the new place. They're positive and encouraging, and even though I haven't changed a thing about how I clean my teeth, they frequently praise me for doing a good job. Thank you for being my easiest appointment of the day, my hygienist told me after my appointment last week.

2. I know you don't care about our dentist, but I'm making another point here. Last year I wrote a couple of posts (here and here) about understanding conservatives. I quit writing them--even though I could have gone on and on--mainly because I was so far out of my league, but also because I got so disgusted by some things conservatives did last year that I decided I was done defending them. But I have to say, here is another thing that drives conservatives nuts, and that their leadership is now capitalizing on: why are we (liberals) so damn negative? I have my theories about that, and maybe I'll write them out some other time. But it seems like liberals are always playing the moral outrage card, the finger-pointing card, the look! I found another way you're wrong! card. 

(For the record, this is not intended to be about the current argument about who has the most positive, hopeful convention. This was mostly written before either of the conventions, although I edited it today. Since I'm not a political junkie, I don't pay all that much attention to them, honestly.)

I am so tired of reading/listening to criticisms of our current president. I don't like him, either, but we're not changing any minds. Could we move on already. I think the lines are already drawn here. Either you think he's awesome, or you think he's ridiculous but he could be a decent president if people would just let him work, or you can't stand him (me). Continuing to harp on how horrible he is is a waste of energy when we really need to be working on other things--positive change, for one thing.

3. I read another book about race a couple of weeks ago (I'll put the title in the first comment). I have mixed feelings about it. It was recommended to me as the one book about race that people should read if they're only going to read one, so I thought I should read it, even though it wasn't (and isn't) the only book about race I've read or will read. 

But I'm not sure I would recommend it. It was the "free" book at our library's ebook site last month, and everyone I talked to that tried it said they couldn't finish it because it was so relentlessly negative. The author would say that is the fault of the reader because of tone policing and white fragility and white apathy and all the other things white people are when we're at our worst, but I think there's a difference between tone policing (when I tell you to phrase something more politely and respectfully so you don't hurt my feelings)(i.e., making it about me) and writing with some awareness of your audience and how to reach them. Knowing your audience is a basic skill of anyone who is trying to communicate with the public. And if the majority of people who pick up your book put it back down again, you've missed your mark.

But having said that, I did finish it, and now that I've had a week or two to think about it, here's what I think: if you can go in with your armor on, realize that a) the author doesn't live in the US and thus is critiquing our culture from the outside, and b) that she makes sweeping generalizations that aren't always accurate, it may be the best way to quickly get a grip on white culture from the perspective of a person of color. 

It's not very long, and in spite of her insistence that you spend time journaling deeply every day during her 28-day program, you can read it fairly quickly. Instead of reading one chapter each day, I read two or occasionally three. I'm sure she would say I missed the whole point of the program because I didn't read it the way she wanted me to, and maybe I did. But I learned a lot--about racism, about myself, and about her-- and I've never, ever been one to follow someone else's arbitrary rules for me blindly, whether they are my parents, the evangelical church, or an author I've never met before. 

So, the pros of the book are: it quickly and neatly identifies the ways that white people marginalize people of color. It avoids stories and anecdotes and just goes for the bullet point info that she wants you to know. And she is excellent on several points (her explanation of the problem of cultural appropriation clarified some things that had confused me in the past, for example). 

The negatives: She assumes that white culture is far more monolithic than it is. She doesn't recognize, even slightly, that there are differences in different regions of the US, and that there is a difference between someone who truly believes that white people are the superior race, and people who are fully committed to racial equality but have lived with blinders on and need to learn. She actually says at one point that if you find yourself arguing with her, you are participating in white supremacy. (So we're not even allowing discussion anymore? She is setting herself up as the arbiter of what's inside my head?) 

She is relentless in shutting down every "good" impulse I (as a white person) have ever had about ways I want our culture to do better-- it's white centering or faux allyship or white saviorism or, or, or. She does finally in the last pages outline a way forward--and by then you're pathetically grateful for it-- but only after she has shredded every idea that you might have had about helping out. 

And you know, maybe she's right. Maybe the only way white people can get it through our thick heads, through the layers of assumptions and ignorance and blindness, is to relentlessly beat us over the head with it. But if you find yourself despairing and discouraged as you read her book--as I did-- try switching to a different one instead of just giving up. 

There are plenty of great ones out there. I personally find the information easier to digest and comprehend when it is accompanied by stories and/or personal narrative. Try the ones I mention in this post, or Black is the Body, which was the one I read after the one I'm discussing. I have books by Ibram X Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates coming up and I'll report back.

I guess I'm glad I read it, but I came out of it exhausted and depressed (instead of feeling energized and ready to march, as I did after the manifesto at the end of Michael Eric Dyson's book What Truth Sounds Like). And she would probably say, well, people of color are exhausted and depressed all the time, so it's only fair.

recent events

(This is two posts mashed together, one written last fall after I read What Truth Sounds Like, one the week of June 8th, both of them edited this week. In other words, it is long. Sorry about that, but I thought it was better to get it all over with in one post. I think I've already proven that I'm not an expert on racism, so don't expect brilliance. I'm tempted to say don't read this post because honestly, white voices are not what is needed right now. Yet here I am.)

Part One

I just wrote and re-wrote and deleted and re-wrote and edited and deleted three paragraphs on the topic of racism, and I've decided to leave them deleted because nobody needs to hear about another white woman uncovering more layers of recognition of her privilege. But it's a dilemma. Sometimes you need to talk about it.

It's not like I didn't know about my privilege before--I understood the idea of white privilege the first time I heard about it thirty years ago-- but I also still have lots more to learn. And I'm discovering, after some things I posted on Instagram, that if you talk about new layers of things you're learning, the assumption is that you knew nothing before, that the whole world of white privilege was an unknown to you until this moment. I've even had people unfollow me.

Whatever you may have made of the story I told you a couple of years ago, I've been supportive of social justice work since a couple of ferociously progressive teachers in my elementary school taught us what was what back in the 60s. (I was so proud of those young men with their raised fists on the medal podium at the 1968 Olympics.)(I was in second grade.)

I may not have been very brave about bucking the status quo, but I've never wanted people of color to suffer or to have fewer opportunities than I do. But I confess that in the past, I've believed that since I vote pro-social justice, I've done everything I needed to do. Racism had nothing to do with me, I thought, because I am not one of those ignorant, racist people. 

Clearly, that kind of passive anti-racism has not been enough to change the way things are. And that means I've had a steep learning curve about the reality of racism in our country. I keep learning more and more about how insidious racism is, and how it has continued practically unchecked without me realizing that it did.

I didn't know, but at some level I have to be honest and say I didn't want to know. I wanted to be able to keep living my untroubled life, at least untroubled by racism. I wanted to believe that the only people who were still racist in the US were a small number of uneducated yahoos that everybody knew were crazy. I was wrong.

And if we can't keep talking about what we're learning, even long after our original moment(s) of insight, we're doing a disservice to the complexity of dismantling racism in this country. It's not a one-time light bulb moment. If saying that--being honest that I'm learning about racism even as I oppose it-- means I get "canceled" because I'm a racist, what are we even doing here? Are we not allowed to learn? Am I supposed to pretend I have perfect understanding when I don't?

Part Two

Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old who was shot by a white man in 2012 for simply walking through his neighborhood, was the "wake up" moment for me. I have a black nephew. He walks through a white neighborhood every day. But just like I wake up bleary-eyed and foggy-brained every morning, that wake-up moment didn't mean I instantly, totally understood the complexity of systemic racism.

I've been occasionally reading and researching ever since, but a couple of years ago I started getting more serious about it-- honestly, at least partly inspired by Colin Kaepernick. He fascinated me (Dean is a moderately serious 49ers fan) even before he set off a firestorm of white outrage. When he knelt for the national anthem (do you remember that at first, he sat?), I was curious. What was he up to? Why did something so simple, so seemingly innocuous, cause such a bitterly furious response?

At first I just read stuff on the internet. And then Austin Channing Brown's I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness. And then So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo last spring. And What Truth Sounds Like by Michael Eric Dyson last fall. And fiction by many black authors.

That probably sounds like bragging, and I suppose at some level it is, but I'm hardly a saint about this. First of all, the more I read, the more I realize how dumb I am about the experience of people of color in our country, even when I've lived and worked right alongside them. And secondly, I argue with these authors in my head. I don't always agree with them. 

But I've learned far more than I've argued. I've been shocked by some of the experiences I've read about, the statistics I've been ignorant of, the systemic oppression that happens while I've blithely looked away. And saddest of all, I'm embarrassed by the way white liberals have not been helpful at. all. (The Dyson book is especially telling on that subject.) The one thing I know for sure: the way people of color are too often treated in this country is just flat-out wrong. There is no excuse. We have to do better. 

So, not sure where I'm going here. I don't want this to be a fad, something that I get all excited about and then a couple of months from now, I've moved along to something else. For several years now, I've wanted this to be an ongoing part of how I live, and that means reading books by black authors and immigrants and Indians and Hispanics and Muslims and members of the LGBTQ community. 

I'm not sure exactly what else it means. Montana is more diverse now than it was when we moved here, but there are still only a few people of color where we live. But I can call people out for racist remarks (and I have)(I have to be honest and tell you it rarely works). I can be open to change and encourage others to do the same. And I can acknowledge that I'm still learning, still uncovering layers of ignorance in myself, hidden attitudes I'm ashamed of, and resistance to change in the places I least want it. But it's work that's worth doing, work that has to be done.

understanding conservatives part 2

I know I've already said this about twenty times, but it bears repeating: my point in writing this two-part post isn't to change your mind or convince you that conservatives are Right. I'm just trying to build bridges instead of continuing to more minutely describe how we disagree. And if you needed further proof of how chaotic it is inside my brain, this post will do it. It's all over the place.

OK, so picking up after yesterday's post....

Another thing: conservatives hate it when we exaggerate to make a point. Once you see it, you realize that we do it all the time. The other night while I was watching the Oscars, at least twice someone talked about some unjust situation in the past and then said something to the effect of "and nothing has changed."

Well, yes, actually, it has. We're a long ways from equality in the workplace, but there are women at the highest levels of corporate American. They're there, and they weren't fifty years ago. Slavery has been illegal for 150 years. Jim Crow laws were declared unconstitutional in the 1960s. Yes, there is still insitutional racism, and yes, we still have a long ways to go, and yes, I can recognize latent racism in my own mind. We're not done by any means. But we start getting pushback on these issues when we try to say that they are the "same" as slavery or segregated water fountains.

(and if you wanted to make a case that in some ways racism is worse now--because it's so insidious-- I'm listening. But you've lost Mr. Middle Class American White Guy. And maybe you legit don't care.)

I live in the midwest, and since most questions about race seem to center around urban areas and the South, I'll just throw out there that there are a whole lot of people in middle American who grew up in all white towns, went to all-white schools, and never saw a black person other than on TV until they were adults. So maybe we could cut a little slack for the guy who was at the bottom of the pecking order at his all-white high school and rolls his eyes when we talk about white privilege. What does that even mean if you live in an area where everyone is white?

(you don't have to explain it to me. I get it. I'm just pointing out the flip side.)

I listened to a conversation between a couple of conservatives not long ago and realized something that I've been chewing on ever since. I think most liberals would list social justice as the most important issue facing our country right now (or maybe the environment, but I'm leaving that aside for the moment). We might quibble about which aspect of social justice we should tackle first--fighting discrimination based on gender, orientation, race, identity, or sexual harassment in the workplace or police brutality or or or, but for the most part, liberals are all on board with social justice.

But for most conservatives, social justice is not what they want from government. Outside of the truly awful, it's not that they don't care about social justice. Some of them care very much, especially when it's something that's right in front of them in their own community (witness the conservatives that attend my church).

No, I think that for conservatives (at least the socially aware ones), it's that the laws to protect people's rights are already on the books. What else is government supposed to do? If the laws aren't being enforced, then that's a conversation we can have, these conservatives might say. But what exactly is the role of government in fighting social prejudice? After outlawing discrimination, how can the government change attitudes? It's a question that's worth some thought (and I think there are some good answers).

Which brings up the point that conservatives really resent it when liberals act like they have a corner on morality. Well, I'm a liberal, so I care about these things, which you obviously don't, or else you'd be a liberal, too, our reasoning seems to go. It's worth pointing out that George Wallace, the infamous governor of Alabama whose signature issue was opposing the Civil Rights movement, was a Democrat. The Jim Crow laws were legislated by Democratic legislatures across the South. Lifelong Republicans who are in their 60s and 70s have pretty good grounds to be mystified by this sanctimonious insistence that Democrats are the only ones who care about civil rights.

Which brings me to one final thought, and I'm not sure how to put it into words. But here is a pattern that you see over and over again. Liberals see an issue that they think needs work, but conservatives don't see it as a problem. So Liberals crank up the rhetoric, start the (perceived) exaggerations, talk louder. Conservatives still don't seem to care. So Liberals crank it up again, getting more and more hysterical. By now Conservatives are totally and completely tuned out. (Think back to the women following Jeff Flake into the elevator during the Kavanaugh hearings, then posing for social media with triumphant grins on their faces.)

It's a classic case of doing the same thing that's not working over again, but louder. Somebody said (supposedly Einstein), "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results." Yeah, well, by that definition our entire country is completely insane right now. We just keep having the same arguments.

I think it's possible that the older conservatives I know are more turned off by hysteria than anything else. The ones among them that like to cause trouble will even try to set it off, because they know they can. Say something slightly sexist, or slightly racist, or whatever, and watch the fur fly. It's as predictable as the sun coming up every day.

I read a blogger a couple of months ago make an offhand, positive comment about styrofoam cups in a completely unrelated context, and I thought to myself, oh, boy, here we go. And sure enough, the comments started. Don't you care about the environment? Don't you care about what you're doing to the ozone layer? I'm surprised at you! I thought you knew better than this! 

I personally do my best to avoid styrofoam, but that's not the point. The point is that I could see that blogger getting angry and resentful at the sanctimonious comments, comments about a situation that really they knew nothing about. (Maybe styrofoam cups are the one anti-environmental thing she allows herself. Remember my face-wipes?) But they felt they had the god-given right to pass judgment.

And speaking of things that are as predictable as the sunrise, this got way too long again. I can't really think of any big overarching conclusions to draw. Maybe this: avoid hysteria. If you think the world should be different, be the change you want to see. Don't shout, scream, bludgeon, judge, preach. It just makes the walls between us that much stronger.

And speaking of moralizing. I'm getting off my soapbox now. I can't imagine that I will be able to think of anything else to say in time for tomorrow so have a great weekend.

understanding conservatives part 1

 If you didn't grow up in a conservative Christian home, you probably don't think about hell very often. But I was raised on that stuff, and being afraid of hellfire and eternal damnation was a big, scary thing for me when I was still an Evangelical.

When I was in my twenties, as I became more and more angry about the un-Christian ways I saw Christians acting, I reached a point where I was so done with conservative Christians that I had the shocking (to me) realization that if those were the people that were going to heaven, I would rather go to hell. I'd rather risk eternal damnation than hang out in heaven with those smug, sanctimonious "saints."

I don't believe in hell anymore-- not because I'm sure it's not there but because the idea of heaven and hell has become irrelevant to me. But I still think about that moment, the moment when I realized that I was so disgusted by conservative Christianity that I was willing to risk eternal damnation to get away from it.

Fast forward to the 2016 election. As I watched the unabashed glee of the Trump base after the election, it suddenly occurred to me that they had hit the inverse of that moment: the moment where they were so disgusted by liberals and holier-than-thou progressive moralizing that they'd rather risk being governed by a known philanderer with zero experience than vote for a liberal Democrat.

(I should insert here that this is all entirely anecdotal, just based on my observations watching the people around me. I have no hard data to back this up. Just so you know.)

The working class conservatives were overjoyed with the feeling of having won a long-shot, wing-and-a-prayer last-minute victory over the Democrats who had completely lost touch with them (see below for more about that). The more well-to-do traditional Republicans, I think, weren't so much voting for President Trump as they were voting against Hillary Clinton, and through her, voting against whatever they perceived to be the liberal/progressive/Democratic agenda.

So my mini-quest to understand the other side became a quest to figure out how we as liberals/progressives managed to so thoroughly enrage the other side. How did we lose them so completely? How did we manage to alienate conservatives so thoroughly that they were willing to believe anything someone said to them as long as it involved trashing the Democrats?

You'll note that I'm assuming that you, gentle reader, are a liberal/progressive. That's because I'm pretty sure I lost all of my conservative readers-- or at least, all the ones I know about-- when I wrote the post about why I am pro-choice. (And I guess if I didn't lose them then, I've lost them now.)

There's a lot of directions that we could go here--for example, in a country that cherishes freedom of the press as much as we all do, how in the world do we hold the media accountable for the ways they have further polarized us to increase their own bottom line? and how in the world did Donald Trump manage to convince working class voters that he was one of them?

But that would be, once again, trying to figure out why they (the press, working class voters, Republicans) are Wrong. Lord knows we've all spent plenty of time doing that. What I'm trying to do here is figure out what we (progressives/liberals) have screwed up. How did we lose them so badly?

So here are some ideas.


For one thing, working class voters resent being lumped together with the poor. When I finally got this, I was embarrassed to death that I'd been doing this for years. When liberals look at each other, mystified as to why working class voters hate them, we think, But we're in favor of food stamps! We want to increase access to medicaid! And we're completely missing that working class voters do not consider themselves to be poor. To them, poor people are people who can't hold a job-- drunks, drug addicts, deadbeats. Those people might need handouts, but working class voters don't want them. They want steady jobs with decent pay and good benefits.

Which leads to a corollary: Conservatives don't consider poor people to be minor saints. I didn't catch this attitude in myself until I'd been working at the food bank for awhile. If you talk about poor people in hushed, reverent tones, or in the same voice that you use to talk about sick children or abandoned puppies, you might be guilty of this, too. Poverty is an enormously complex issue that I'm not going to tackle in a blog post, but I can guarantee you that this attitude is not helpful. Or at least, not if you're a volunteer at a food bank.

as always, this is getting too long. The other half is mostly written, so I'll probably post it tomorrow. I can't believe I'm posting this, because I am so far from being an expert on this that it's like the proverbial chalk from cheese. And the more I write, the more I realize how presumptuous it is of me to post this as if I know what I'm talking about. My only comfort is that not many people read here, and also, if you're a conservative and you're reading this and I've gotten anything wrong, I'm counting on you to let me know.

to be continued.

In which I do even more re-hashing about church, or maybe it's just hashing this time, and continue to fail to get to the point.

So when I left off this topic last Tuesday, our little presbyterian church, which has been in the same location for over 100 years, had seen a steep drop in membership, but we still have our dedicated loyal survivors of about 180 members. We're lucky that includes a broad range of opinions, viewpoints, and outlooks on life.

I say lucky because that's really hard to find right now. People tend to congregate (pun!) with the likeminded. Our church is one of the few places I know where people with markedly different opinions about all sorts of things coexist and actually function well together to accomplish good things in the community--we're actively involved in working with at-risk teens, the homeless shelter, feeding the hungry, and an array of other activities.

I highly value that diversity of opinion. There are churches in our town that are more in line with my own opinions, but I don't want to go to church in an echo chamber. I grew up with that, and it's stifling.

It works for awhile because you can get that warm glow of "I know I'm right about this because everyone around me agrees with me," but eventually that sameness becomes restrictive. If your opinions change as you learn new things and have new experiences, you may find that the people you thought loved you for who you are, actually only love you if you fit in. Or they say they still love you (and maybe they genuinely do), but they don't want you in the group anymore.

At least that was my experience. I'm getting way off track here.

About a month ago, someone spoke up during worship with an opinion that was phrased in decidedly liberal/Democrat language.* The person that spoke is so immersed in that segment of our culture that she didn't think she was being partisan, she thought she was just stating The Way Things Are, with a ringing call to champion social justice.

But the conservatives heard a liberal saying "only Democrats care about this issue" and suddenly a wide-open rift has occurred right in the middle of our church. And we're finding out that this particular rift has been on the verge of breaking open for a couple of years now.
It's worth stating the obvious here and pointing out that these conservatives are not way-out right-wing nutcases. They go to a church--some of them for decades--that has no problem with women in church leadership, in a denomination that states that a woman's pregnancy decisions should be between her and her physician, and also allows gay ordination and same-sex marriage.

And yet they vote Republican, and they don't see a problem with that. (I don't either.) They're Republican because they were raised that way, or because of their views about fiscal policy, or banking regulations, or the military, or foreign policy.

In the aftermath of this incident, we're coming to realize that the reason we've been able to coexist for so long is because we don't talk about politics. And I find myself in the unusual situation of being a liberal who is defending the conservatives. It's making me a little nuts. The noise that's being drummed up on the part of the more liberal members of our congregation has become so unbearably tone-deaf that I can hardly stand to be involved. But I'm on session (church leadership) right now and so, voilà. I'm involved.
The whole situation has made me realize how clueless some liberals are about some conservatives. I live in a community that usually votes heavily conservative--in 2016, President Trump took 65% of the votes, and since various other parties took 6%, that means less than 30% voted Democrat. So I have a front-row seat on understanding conservatives, something I think liberals who live in more populous areas don't really have. I can't avoid the Trump base, or the never-Trumpers, or the Libertarians, because I live right in the middle of them.

So as a service to you, my gentle readers, I'm going to pass on some things I've learned about Conservatives in the past two years. Because when President Trump won the election, I made a small promise to myself that I would try to learn, and not just dissolve into anger and despair. (I confess I haven't always been successful.)

Please note that I'm not doing this because I'm trying to convince you that they're right, but because it is time, it is long past time, for us to start building bridges instead of continuing to yell at each other about how wrong the other side is. 

Good grief, how do these things get so long? I was planning to get started on what I wanted to say, but this is already too long. To be continued, and since I want to get this done because I need to sort it out for myself, I may actually post Out Of Schedule. Wtf is the world coming to.

Happy Tuesday.

* Apologies for the lack of details, I'm being purposely vague so if anyone local reads this, it will be unidentifiable.

In which I re-hash some old stuff about going to church

I have some things I want to talk about but I feel the need to do some set up first. So there are several things in this post, which will seem unrelated at the moment, but eventually maybe it will make sense.

First is informational: I think people who are not religious sometimes don't realize that there is wide variation in the political and social beliefs of people who call themselves Christian. There are, of course, the conservative Christians who try to reserve the use of the term "Christian" for themselves, and who are very publicly anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion, and pro-virginity (for unmarried women). They also often oppose the ordination of women (i.e., women cannot be pastors in their churches, and in some versions, women are not allowed to even lead worship or pray from the pulpit).

Although that group of people think that they alone are "Christian," there are actually millions of people who honor the life and teachings of Jesus Christ but who don't share that set of prejudices. I was raised to be one of those conservative Christians, and I didn't realize that Christians could be any other way until I was in college and started visiting some other, different churches. That simple realization, which was mind-boggling to me at the time, felt like the truth that had set me free. It was one of the best things that's ever happened to me.

Dean and I have attended the same church in our small Montana town since we moved here in 1992. At the time, the congregation was fairly large for the size of our town (300-ish members), and there were regularly well over a hundred people in worship services.

If you've been around for awhile, you may remember that although we attended church sort-of regularly (1-2 times/month), I didn't join for a long time. Dean joined shortly after we moved here, but I was still feeling ambivalent about church, and although this particular church had many of the things I wanted in a church family (other kids the same age as ours, friendly atmosphere, active in the community, and allowed women to be pastors), it didn't have certain others--most obviously, it discriminated against the LGBTQ community by not allowing them to be elders, deacons, or pastors. (Same-sex marriage wasn't even a discussion in 1992.)

So I attended without joining, and if you want to read more about that, I wrote a post about it in 2011. But that ambivalence was maybe even more important. In 1992, I had only very recently been able to disentangle myself from my evangelical upbringing, and I just wasn't interested in tying myself to another church of any type. Church still filled a need for me, a need for ritual and acknowledgement of a Divine Being, and I loved (and still love) the community of people at our church. But I couldn't really agree with a lot of the things you had to say you agreed with if you joined, so I didn't. Join, I mean.

Ack, I could keep going on about this for paragraphs but it's not necessary for where I'm going with this. Long story short: At some point in there, I read Kathleen Norris's book Amazing Grace, which helped with my ambivalence about the church's creeds. And then our denomination approved gay ordination in 2011, and shortly thereafter I officially joined the church I'd been attending for 18 years. And then in 2014-15, our denomination changed the language of the Book of Order to allow pastors to perform same-sex weddings, and I was even happier.

On both of those occasions, we lost a sizeable number of members of our church. And then of course people left for other reasons, and new people came, and babies were born and people died. So now our church has about 180 members, and we've been through a lot.

And if you read all the way through this post, you've been through a lot, too. I will try to make it worth your while when I get around to part two, which probably won't be until next week.

END THE SHUTDOWN. GOOD GRIEF.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled break to bring you this public service announcement. If you, like me, are not financially affected by the government shutdown, you may not know that the Department of Agriculture has found a way to pay February SNAP benefits (the program commonly known as food stamps, which are now paid out on debit cards), but they can only do it by distributing those funds early-- this week, in fact.

If the shutdown continues, those funds are the last that SNAP recipients will receive for the foreseeable future. At our local food bank today, I listened to the staff try to plan for the inevitable result of this news: an enormous increase in people needing the food bank. It's not pretty. This affects millions of people nationwide, including well over 100,000 in Montana.

You can claim the moral high road for awhile, and I certainly have my opinion on which side has it (hint: if you ask me, building a wall would be a huge waste of taxpayer dollars). But that time has ended. Get your butts back to the table and figure this out. This is about children being able to eat.

If both sides compromise and present a plan to the president (which I sincerely hope does not include funding for a wall, but at the moment, that's not my highest concern), it will be clear that the problem is the president. He will sign. And one suspects that he will figure out a way to call it a win, because he always does.

That's all. This has to stop.

spiritual highs

I put this off till the last minute, so this is going to be more of a list of bullet points than a post.

I've been thinking about spiritual highs--the mind-altering experiences that some people have that seem to have some element of blissful hyper-awareness involved. These experiences become a kind of holy grail, an state of mind that people chase after, because they've heard it's so amazing. There's a lot to unpack here. The experience of transcendence or spiritual bliss or whatever your particular tradition encourages can be and often is life-changing.

But there are some things about the idea that are-- well, if not disturbing, at least troubling. For one thing, it's this kind of spiritual experience that tends to make people think they've found The Truth. If you're Buddhist or Christian or whatever, and you have a mind-blowing spiritual experience in the context of your faith, it convinces you that your tradition is Right. In future times of doubt or uncertainty, that moment of conversion or enlightenment or whatever will be the thing that you look back to convince yourself that you're on the right track.

The problem with that is that people of all religious traditions have mind-blowing experiences. There are Christians who have amazing conversion stories to tell-- addictions ended, diseases healed. Saint Theresa is famous for her exalted experience of God. Buddhists have enlightenment. Sufis have ecstatic whirling. I'm very quickly getting out of things I can knowledgeably discuss, but I've investigated enough spiritual traditions to be sure that every tradition offers a path to transcendence. So that confidence that your tradition is the Right Tradition because "look at these amazing experiences that we have!" is a false confidence. The fact that people experience spiritual highs in your tradition just means that yup, it's a legitimate spiritual tradition.

And then there's the whole element of spiritual snobbery. Oh, you haven't experienced enlightenment? Oh, you haven't spoken in tongues? Oh, you haven't (fill in the blank with whatever spiritual experience is the cool, popular experience of the moment)? It's a strong enough thing that people are known to lie about it, or to think they've experienced it when they really haven't, because surely someone who has been meditating faithfully for x number of years has experienced something that a newbie who sits down for the first time can experience.

The mainline church I attend (more on that another time) is full of people who have faithfully followed the teaching of their church for their entire lives, and yet have never had a conversion experience, because they've been attending our church since birth. Does that make them less Christian than the person whose remarkable conversion experience included coming back from the brink of death by addiction?

And can't the small, mini-mind-blowing experiences that all of us experience every time we learn something new add up over time to something more solid, more real than a one-time experience of "enlightenment" or "conversion" that peters out over the following years because it wasn't followed up by anything else?

Maybe this is just sour grapes on my part, because I've had plenty of the mini-mind-altering experiences, the a-ha! moment that changes perceptions and feelings and leads to small-scale but perceptible growth, but I've never experienced "enlightenment," full stop. Since I was raised Evangelical, I never experienced conversion (unless you count my reverse conversion away from Evangelicalism in my twenties, but that wasn't a one-time event).

I think it's typical of the American mindset, including my own, that we hear about the big bang, the WOW factor of a spiritual tradition, and that's what we want. We don't want the hours of practice, the days of grinding work to feed the poor or visit the sick, we don't want to give up our creature comforts, we just want the fireworks, and quickly.

I don't have much else to say about this, and obviously this isn't something I've got any answers to, beccause I'm not even sure this makes sense. But it's what I've been thinking about quite a bit after listening to a podcast last week. And since I'm so tired I can barely hold my eyes open, I may have to come back and edit this or write more on this topic another time.

More Types: meditation and maybe the most obvious type of all (edited)

(Edited 5/26/2018. I typed this out almost without editing on Monday night, but as I've thought about it over the past few days, I realized I was too negative toward the end. The only changes are to the last third.)

It occurred to me that maybe the most obvious type of all personality types is whether or not you find the idea of personality types useful/helpful. If you think the idea of personality types is right up there with astrology and magical thinking, then I can understand why you would find the topic so utterly uninteresting. It's like the punch line to a joke (a not very funny one): There are two types of people in the world, the people who like types and the people that don't.

But for me, figuring out my own personal framework has been unendingly helpful. That four tendencies thing I talked about a couple of months ago-- that has been great. Now when I see myself going into Obliger mode, I can notice it and sometimes I can choose to act differently if I need to. I love having the extra self-awareness it gives me.

Another one has occurred to me, and that is, for lack of a better way of stating it, what type of core self you have, or maybe your tendency to calmness or chaos. I have to back up to explain this one. For a long time, I had a really hard time with meditation because the teachers (even my favorite, Pema Chodron) would talk about finding the naturally spacious, calm place inside of you. The idea seemed to be that if you dig through all of your layers of fear and false expectations and whatever else, you'd get to this place of naturally-occurring peace and calm that was your True Self. (or not-Self, if you're Buddhist, but that's an entirely different discussion.)

The problem with that was that the further I dug, the more tangled things got. I could create a space of peace and calm in my head (for a few seconds anyway), but I never got the sense that it was the "real" me. Ever. Not even once. So for awhile I decided (because, you know, I know more than every single person who has ever meditated in the history of the world), that all those teachers were Wrong, and that really, the only way to get to this space of peace and calmness was to learn how to create it-- that our "real", "natural" selves were a maelstrom of chaotic thoughts and feelings.

But recently it has occurred to me that maybe-- *drum roll* --people are just different. Maybe there are some people who can dig through all their layers and they get to a place that feels like coming home to their true selves and it's all peaceful and calm in there. And maybe there are others of us who just keeping on coming up with more layers of muck the further we dig--in other words, at the core of true selves is a chaotic mess. Or, to put it more positively, a whirlwind of chaos and color.

If that's true, for those of us who are the second type, the purpose of meditation isn't to find an inner place of peace that already exists, but to create that peace, to learn how to observe the whirlwind without getting sucked into actually feeling chaotic.

What would we call this? People who are naturally calm vs people who are naturally chaotic? I don't know. But it would explain why some people, when they try meditation, just get more and more angry as they feel more and more like failures for not being able to find this mythical, supposedly natural, feeling of peace and calm, while other people take to it like the proverbial ducks to water.

Or maybe I just haven't dug through enough layers yet.

TBT: Suffering and the daily grind

(This is an edited version of a post that first appeared in January, 2008 in my previous blog.)

I was talking to a similarly-aged friend yesterday about getting things done. There are things that we have to do to keep the wheels turning, so to speak-- pay the bills, buy the groceries, prepare the food, do the landry, clean the kitchen--the things that keep our lives going, the things we do over and over again just because they need to be done. And then there are things that we do that feel like real accomplishments, like helping someone in need, or finishing a creative endeavour, or launching a new project.

It reminded me of this old post about suffering, and the way buddhists understand it. Suffering is an important concept in Buddhism, but one that took me a long time to understand. Maybe I still don't understand it very well.

At first reading, it seems so entirely different than the Christian understanding of suffering. In my Evangelical childhood, I was taught to see suffering as a means to an end. The New Testament epistle of James says quite bluntly: "Consider it all joy, my brothers, when you encounter various trials (ie, when you suffer), knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance, and endurance produces perfect results, that you may be full and complete, lacking in nothing."

In Christianity, suffering is something that happens to you--an illness, unemployment, loss of a friend or loved one. You pass through problems and "tribulations" so that the trivial and unimportant is burned away, and you become a better Christian, a better person. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, more or less.

So when I first started studying Buddhism and ran across the idea that "All is suffering" (a summary of the First Noble Truth), and that the point of Buddhism is to escape suffering, it made no sense to me. Why would you want to escape suffering? Suffering is part of life. You can't run from your problems. Suffering is what helps you grow up. If you run from suffering, you miss out on life, you are a baby.
I struggled with this misunderstanding for a long time. I spent the whole time I was reading the Dalai Lama's book on happiness arguing with him.

Finally one day last spring I GOT it. I was drying my hair, and feeling irritated that it was already time to get a haircut again. You get a haircut; it's too short for a week; then it's just right for a couple of weeks; then it's getting too long; then it's already time for a hair cut again.
It was like the proverbial lightbulb went on. Oh! I get it! The Buddhist idea of suffering is more about the endless cycle, the daily grind, the unending work of getting through life. You get up, eat breakfast, go to work, come home, eat dinner, clean up, go to bed, then the next day you do it all over again. It's all about the cycle, the endless cycle.

It's a classic East/West difference. I was trained to think of suffering as a linear thing, something that happens along the way that is a means to an end, a process that gets you to a goal-- the goal of being a better Christian. Your life is going along just fine, then some big problem hits, and you have to get through it. Then (if you're lucky) things go back to normal. Getting through the time of suffering helps you grow.

The Buddhist idea is about endless reiterations of the same things, the kinds of things my WASP brain would have considered background, white noise. In Christianity, suffering is big stuff--persecution, illness, losing your job. In Buddhism, suffering is just the grind, the stuff you have to do over and over to get through the day.

Like laundry. Laundry never ends. There is always more laundry to do at our house. Or cooking. Someone is always hungry. Or batteries. You charge them up, and then before you know it they have to be charged again.

But once I got that figured out, it seems that the attitude that you have toward suffering in both traditions is pretty similar. You don't run from it, you don't avoid it, you dive in. The Buddhist idea of "escape" from suffering isn't about running from your problems, it's about reincarnating at a higher level of existence where there is no suffering. But where Christianity emphasizes endurance, getting through it, Buddhism emphasizes staying open, not shutting down, while you are in the midst of suffering.

Pema Chodron says you try to stay soft, instead of closing up like a clenched fist. You let yourself experience your suffering fully. You grow up. What I had interpreted in Buddhism as wanting to run away from suffering is actually not attaching importance to suffering, not letting yourself get caught up in the daily soap opera of our lives.

Disclaimer: As always, my understanding of Buddhism is anything but expert. More experienced insights welcome.
------------------------------
So, getting back to my conversation with my friend, when we accomplish something that has a different feeling than getting through the daily grind, does that help? I think a part of me believes that my self-worth lies in those accomplishments, in doing something that "makes a difference." But the problem with that is when I'm in a period of time when I'm not accomplishing anything except getting through the daily grind, what am I worth? I need something stronger than that, I think. Or maybe I need to jettison the idea that my self-worth lies in earning a place for myself, getting to a point where I feel like I "deserve" to be here.

Hmmmm. This is going off in an entirely different direction. Too much time in my head this week.

in with the bad air, out with the good

(This is not the post I was going to write when I sat down, this was just going to be one paragraph at the beginning before I moved on to some other point which I can't even remember at the moment. Which means that I was figuring it out as I'm typed, which means that it's probably not exactly clear. But I don't have time to come up with something else to post about at this point. Forewarned is forearmed.)

Years ago I listened to a series of recorded lectures by Pema Chodron, a Buddhist teacher, about the practice of tonglen. Briefly, tonglen is the meditation practice of returning good for evil. You breathe in negativity and breathe out goodness. It sounds simple, but in fact, it can be quite difficult to do.

Pema Chodron says that tonglen is an intermediate practice, an idea that immediately gets my back up because I'm not a fan of hierarchical spirituality -- i.e., higher levels of spiritual insight that are only available to people who are in the know or have been around for awhile. I'm not a fan for two reasons: because first of all, it tends toward spiritual snobbery (poor you, you're not as spiritual as me because you haven't reached the level of teaching I have), and secondly, because it doesn't seem to me to be the way spiritual teachings work. Most spiritual lessons are utterly simple, and you just keep learning them over and over again in different ways and different situations. "Love is patient" or "give thanks in all circumstances" are pretty simple, but I keep having to learn them in new ways, sometimes deeper, sometimes harder, sometimes just the same lesson over again.

But in the case of tonglen, Pema Chodron has a point when she says it is an intermediate practice. It's a difficult practice because it's damn hard to actively love someone who means you harm, or who slights and ignores you, or who undermines your confidence, or does any of a thousand other things that hurt or betray. If mis-practiced, it can leave you open to abuse.

Also, it's easy to learn this lesson in a way that's false-- in some pollyanna way, making myself a martyr to the idea, when really I'm just slapping a Nice label on my fear of standing up for myself. I think you can only legitimately say that you love your enemy when you stand strong in yourself, take the negativity on the chin, don't duck it or complain about it or whine about it, and yet at the same time find compassion and kindness for the person who means you harm.

There is some similarity in Jesus' teaching in the sermon on the mount. Jesus says if someone slaps you on the cheek, turn the other cheek and let them slap you again. If someone asks you to carry his gear for a mile, offer to carry it two. In my false understanding of this teaching, I have at times simply let myself become a doormat--OK, I'll do whatever you want, because it's easier to go along with it than it is to fight it. I'll just suck it up and take it without complaining--on the outside. But inside I'm whining about being a victim, it's so unfair, you shouldn't act like that, it's not fair.

I don't want to say that Buddhism and Christianity are the same, because they're not. It demeans both religions to try and reduce them down to a set of universal principles. But this is a great example of the way that I've been able to use my understanding of both of them to illuminate each other.

Learning the similar-but-different Buddhist teaching shows me a different dimension that may be closer to what Jesus actually intended. Because Jesus doesn't say to just suck it up and don't complain. He says to take it as an opportunity to show a different way of responding. You're acting out of a desire to put me in my place, but I'm showing you how to be gracious and compassionate instead. I see how you are trapped by the way you are treating me. You are suffering, too.

The thing is, it's not easy to do, especially in the moment when you're insulted and pissed and all you want to do is strike back. In fact, I've been really bad at it this week. I've been in a couple of situations where I interpreted something as an insult, and I fumed and felt sorry for myself and whined. This shit ain't easy.

Buddhism offers another principle I find helpful, though. In the Buddhist teaching, you start out on things that are easier and you practice. You start with some negative thing that is unconnected to you, say an unkindness or unfairness that you know about through hearsay, something you don't feel particularly strongly about. You practice breathing in the negative emotions, and breathing out the positive. Then you gradually shift to things that are more personal, that really do get an instantaneous angry response out of you, and let yourself sit with that response.

Breathe it in, let it transform, breathe it out. You're not taking in the bad thing and sending nothing back out, you're actively transforming the bad energy into good energy. It's a skill.

One that I'm not good at. But I'm practicing. And if I can learn the skill, like all such learning, it's empowering. Love makes us powerful, not doormats.

oops I did it again

I was driving in for my shift at the food bank yesterday when I realized that I never even thought about my usual Tuesday post. I've written a few recently that were last minute or otherwise haphazard, but I can't remember the last time that I flat-out forgot about my blog. Does this have some deeper meaning, or am still recovering from the stress of the past month? Who knows.

I did have an idea over the weekend of what to write about, but maybe I will save that for next week. At the moment, all I can do is worry about our country. I was listening to a podcast not long ago and one of the speakers, a blogger, said that she has been having a hard time coming up with things to post about because she is determined to stay out of politics, and yet she's so worried about the election it's all she wants to talk about.

I'm naturally apolitical-- I've never been one to follow politics, or enjoy debates, or in any way participate in our political process other than voting (I always vote). But I get what she means. It's hard to see how this is going to end well. I suppose things are at their very worst right now, with both parties divided and angry at others in their own party, let alone the other party. Maybe it will get better once the conventions are over. But at the moment, with huge chunks of each party insisting that they will refuse to participate if this or that happens, it's hard to see how healing will occur.

As a long-time democrat, I was expecting to sit back and watch smugly as our candidate sailed to an easy convention win while the GOP fell apart under the weight of their infighting. I can't regret Bernie's presence in our political process, because clearly he is voicing something that many feel. Having a voice is what democracy is all about.

But I wish he had figured out a way to do it without splitting the party. Pragmatically speaking, I'm skeptical about the viability of Bernie's ideas if he is elected, since almost nothing he proposes is likely to pass a Republican-controlled legislature. It sounds like The Adventures of Polarized Stagnant Congress Part II, if you ask me (and of course you didn't).

The thing that worries me most is the people on either extreme who are sure that everything will be fine if only their candidate wins. And the only way things will be fine is if their candidate wins. Those of us who are moderates--either left or right-- are left staring in disbelief, and worrying. For the first time ever, I feel I have more in common with moderate Republicans than I do with the extreme members of my own party.

I am so enormously grateful at the moment that I have friends in all camps. Having people I love and/or respect who thoroughly disagree with my opinions has opened my eyes to a wide variety of ways of looking at our current scene. There are so many who either by choice or by reason of geography or whatever have come to believe that what they think is what most reasonable people think, and that people who disagree must be ignorant and uninformed. But I can't do that, because I know too many wonderful people who believe differently than I do.

I don't know what I'm saying, I'm just writing off the cuff. I probably shouldn't even post this, because after all the times I've said I'm not writing about politics, this makes twice in the past two weeks. But it's what I'm thinking about right now.

bathrooms, independence, and watching your kid drive away

I just watched MadMax drive himself off to school--his first time driving since the surgery, second day back at school. The surgery was on his left knee, so his driving leg has been fine all along, but still he was radiating happiness and relief that he is independent of his mother's driving and attention once more. Yesterday, after two weeks out of school, he told his calculus teacher that he was probably the only senior in the building who was happy to be at school on Monday morning. I think the boredom has been at least as bad as the pain. Maybe worse.

It reminded me of watching our kids drive off alone for the first time after they got their license. They're both good, safe drivers. They'd done driver's ed, they'd driven hours with me or their dad keeping watch. But you can't help but worry, watching them drive off alone. So many things can go wrong, lots of them completely unrelated to their driving skills.

In other news....: We had an interesting conversation about gender and bathrooms over dinner last night, which made me think. I have to balance my immediate liberal-bias reaction about yet another fear-based assault on the rights of -- I was going to say "the trans community," but really, it's anybody. We react in fear and dismay when any of our cherished beliefs about race or gender or class are challenged -- I have to balance my immediate, genuine support of anyone whose right to be themselves is being challenged, against my (also genuine) reaction of ewwww to the idea of running into a visibly male person in the women's room.

Even in a dirty, unkempt public bathroom, the women's room has always had a slight air of sanctuary, a place where you could hike up your skirt and adjust your panty hose, or check your teeth in the mirror, or bum a tampon in an emergency--all the things we'd hesitate to do in front of men.

The only trans woman I'm aware of here locally is visibly trans, a big 6-foot-plus person, who nonetheless dresses elegantly and is always polite and, for lack of a better word, decorous. If I'm entirely honest with myself, I have to admit it would make me a little uncomfortable to run into her in the women's room at Target.

But that's the point. This is on me. It's my discomfort. How about her discomfort in having to deal with this issue at all? Like many in the trans community, she has probably spent far more energy than any of us can imagine organizing her day around not needing to use public bathrooms so she could avoid this exact scenario. We want to define anything that makes us uncomfortable as Wrong, and thus keep our cherished beliefs intact while shifting all responsibility for dealing with differences off on the people who are different.

That's just not acceptable to me anymore. Either we're going to do our best to make our culture accepting and tolerant of all kinds of people we deem strange, or we aren't. Presumably when a trans woman is attending to her bodily needs, she'll be well-concealed by a stall, just as I will be as I attend to mine. I'm willing to live with a little discomfort in order to try and make the world a safer place for everybody. People put up with my weirdnesses every single day, should I not return the favor?

The whole fear-and-panic thing about sexual predators in public bathrooms is completely unchanged by which gender is allowed to use which stalls. Years ago when our kids were young and gender identity was an invisible issue, a neighbor involved in law enforcement told us, "Don't ever let your kid go in a public bathroom alone. You have no idea."

This is simple when your opposite sex child is small, but there were several years when MadMax was in the 8-12 age range that I stood outside the men's room watching the seconds tick by on my watch until he came out again. More than once I was on the panicked verge of approaching a friendly-looking man to go in and see what was taking him so long (because it had been more than a minute and a half). (As if any man who is outside the bathroom is less dangerous than the ones that are in. Go figure. I was panicked.) I didn't want to scare him, but I wanted him to be aware. I can remember telling him, if anything seems strange, just come right back out. I confess I let him pee in the bushes a few times rather than go alone into a public bathroom in a deserted place.

In other words: This is not a new problem, and it is not a problem that has anything more to do with the trans community than it does with the cis community. Restricting people to the bathroom that matches the genitals they were born with is not going to solve this problem. Let's not confuse the issues here.

So, that's my .02, and that's probably all it's worth. You watch your kid walk into the public restroom, you watch your kid drive away. We can wrap them in bubble wrap and keep them at home, or we can live in the real world and manage its dangers as best we can. I hope we can keep from adding imaginary dangers to the real ones.

7ToF: pain, forgiveness, and moving forward

(this got really long, apologies in advance. you've been warned.)

1. The surgery went well. Thank you to all of you who were thinking of MadMax. I did manage to keep it together. Dean was here for the surgery and the first day--and since he's not usually available during the day, I was really grateful for that. But he's been on a business trip since Wednesday, so the last couple of days (and nights) have gone by in a blur of timing meds, changing ice packs, and trying to get some sleep. MadMax is as usual being patient and stoic, but it's pretty painful. I have a hard time going back to sleep if I'm woken up (we've been setting alarms for meds), which has led to not much sleep, but even so I've slept considerably more than he has.

2. Said blur is the reason this post is late. About eleven last night, while I was lying on the other twin bed in MadMax's room keeping him company while watching Megamind, I remembered that it was Thursday and thus time for a blog post, and I just couldn't get up the energy to do it. Also, I was going to title this post Nurse Nancy after the old Golden Book, but fortunately I googled first. Oh, my. The times, they change.

3. I'd better start typing about something else or I will start telling you way more than you want to know about MadMax's recovery. So, let's see. Ah, it is coming back to me what I was going to post about. I'm reading a memoir by Ken Wilber about his wife's journey through cancer treatment, Grace and Grit. I'm not quite done with it yet, but it has given me lots to think about. He is a philosopher with a gazillion books to his name about spirituality, mysticism, religion, theology, philosophy, psychology and who knows what else. One of the things that makes this book so fascinating is the vast reach of topics covered. It feels pretty dated--it was first published 25 years ago, and cancer treatments and public attitudes have changed since then. Also, he is annoyingly sure that everyone wants to know his opinion about everything. And occasionally he goes into way more detail than I want, so I start to skim. But other than those caveats, it is fascinating. Worthwhile read.

4. He alternates his version of what's happening with his wife's journals. (Even though I haven't finished yet, it says right on the cover of the book that she dies at the end, so no spoilers here.) They are wide open to alternative treatments, but there is none of the blatant disregard for science and reality that I was expecting because of that. They go with conventional treatment until the conventional treatments stop working. He is surprisingly honest about some of the things they go through--the near meltdown of their relationship at one point, the prosaic nature of his own major epiphany toward the end. I alternate between being thoroughly annoyed with him and cheering him on.

5. They (the two of them) are at their best when they are dismantling the belief--still so widespread even now--that you create your own reality, and its corollary, that you get cancer (or any sickness) because of something you did or didn't do, or because you chose to be sick. Treya (his wife) has a great essay (which he includes) about how this belief affected her personally. She points out that, regardless of whether or not it is true, when you tell someone who has cancer that they got it because they didn't express their anger toward their mother or whatever, it's not helpful. When you are the recipient of statements like that, it feels like you are being attacked, not supported. Also, because it happens so often, the person with cancer soon starts to realize that the person making these statements is trying to reassure themselves that they're not going to get cancer because they haven't done whatever it is. It's about control, not support. Then Wilber takes on the whole "you create your own reality" mindset and brings it down, beautifully. Since I spent quite a bit of time in my old blog trying (less successfully) to do the same thing -- this post, for example-- I was cheering in my seat.

6. So buried among the mountain of ideas in this book, including quite a bit about how to support someone who is chronically ill or dying, there are two things that have profoundly affected me. One is a discussion fairly early on about forgiveness. I've been involved in several discussions over the years about forgiving the big things--an abusive parent or spouse, a scout leader who raped you, the big things. But I hadn't really spent much time thinking about forgiveness of the little things, the little resentments and hurts that don't really amount to much but that pile up over time. Wilber has a theory about that-- as we develop from the undifferentiated awareness of infancy, the way we learn to define ourselves is because of the little bumps, bruises, and insults we receive as we realize that we are not the same person as our caretaker. Thus, the ego is in effect defined by its hurts. Some of us come to identify so thoroughly with the ego that we hold on tightly to every single little resentment, because without those little hurts, we are nothing. Forgiveness feels threatening, because if I let go of all those little hurts, who am I? I must have them! Forgiveness is the way we let go of our small self, the selfish, narcissistic, it's-all-about-me self, and expand into a larger consciousness. This should be an entire post (and in fact it was the post I was going to write on Monday when it got pre-empted by ACL repair), but I love this. Very helpful insight.

7. And the other thing that had a significant take-home message for me is his discussion of the "pre/trans fallacy." My interpretation of it is possibly not what he intends at all and is definitely a vast over-simplification. But in all the years that I've tried meditation, I've always understood that I was reaching back to some ideal state that I was in before-- I think I might even have defined it as that infant state of undifferentiated awareness. When I meditate, I've been trying to sift through all of the experiences, emotions, intellectual fallacies, cognitive dissonances, whatever and get back to some previous, deeply buried state of peace and bliss. And it never worked. It felt to me like the more I dug, the more tangled up in my own mess I became.

But I get the idea from reading Wilber's discussion of the pre/trans fallacy that an early (pre-personal) state of mind is not the goal. The goal is to move forward into an integrated (trans-personal) consciousness, bringing all that you have learned, all that you have experienced with you. It's not a return to a lower state of consciousness, it's growth into a higher state of consciousness. Hmmm. I'm pretty sure I'm not describing it very well, because I'm making it sound hierarchical. But the basic idea feels important to me. If it's something that interests you, you should definitely read this book, because he explains it better than I do.

So, wow, that was way too much stuff for a Friday, but it's all I've got. If you're still reading, thanks and have a great weekend.

the middle way, again

I've been reading a book by British theologian N.T. Wright called Surprised by Hope. I'm never very good at reading non-fiction, but his discussion of beauty and art at the very end of the book interested me. He identifies a trend in contemporary art that we've talked about before: "[contemporary art] responds to ugliness with more ugliness....a kind of brutalism that under the guise of realism simply expresses futility and boredom."

That is so true. Under the guise of realism, contemporary art is often about unrelieved ugliness, brutality, and futility. I'm reading short stories again in preparation for teaching a short story class, and when you read some of these stories, you'd be hard pressed to believe that there is one single honest, responsible, or compassionate person on the planet. Everything's a mess.

And it is. You don't have to watch the news for long to realize that on a large scale, everything's a mess. But to counter that, every day I see people who are kind and compassionate and taking care of their kids and not taking drugs and shouldering their responsibilities in the face of bad odds.

Who's being unrealistic? The person concentrating only on the absolute worst that life can be, or the person concentrating only on the best?

Of course, truly realistic art would hold both these poles in tension with each other, interacting with each other, playing off each other. Despair, futility, and boredom (it is perhaps Wright's most profound moment in this discussion that he includes boredom) would be tempered by the equally realistic knowledge that the world abounds with hope and beauty, and that human beings can be and often are kind and compassionate.

Wright casts this discussion in specifically Christian terms of redemption and resurrection, but I'm more and more convinced that it's a wider discussion than that. I'm not enough of a theologian to delve into that here, but it's an interesting thing to think about. Good book, if it's a topic that interests you--although the discussion about art is only a small part at the end.

TBT why I still go to church

This is a slightly edited version of the second half of this post. The first half was about what I believed back in 2005, this part is about why I still go to church, a different question. I used to think that since I had my own special relationship with God, I didn't really need church. Now I feel almost the opposite--church serves its own purpose in my life, regardless of how I'm feeling about God on any given day.

TBT: What I believed, ten years later

I wrote this back in 2005, when my blog was specifically about my religious beliefs. In some ways, nothing has changed, although I think I used to be more sincere. I might not word things quite the same now. Also, I've become a bit more conventional over time, a bit less afraid of letting myself follow a particular tradition. (AuntBeaN was my blog name in my old blog.)
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In Which Aunt BeaN Attempts to Make Sense of Various Things Which Are Too Big for a BeaN of Little Brain.

So the purported subject of this particular post is supposed to be what I believe now. And why I still go to church, and believe me, I'm not sure I have the answer to that one sometimes myself. I've been putting this off for ages because it's hard to figure out how to say some things, and also because it sounds so pompous and self-important to announce What I Believe, as if you are sure everyone wants to know. So I just want to say in advance that if this sounds pretentious, at least I know I sound pretentious and I feel bad about it. OK?

DwD: depression's useful side

I think the first and most important thing I've learned, and I can't stress this enough, is that depression isn't a bad thing. The first time a therapist said this to me, it was a complete mind-blower. There are things that are worth being depressed about, she said. I'm sure I stared at her with my jaw hanging open.

how not to meditate part 2

There was somewhere I was going with these meditation posts, and as is often the case, I can no longer remember where it was. Maybe it will come back to me later. But at the moment, I need a post for tomorrow and this one is already half-written, so here you go.

- Along the lines of mixing up my meditation practice a little, once or twice a week I do a guided meditation--i.e., someone has recorded meditation instructions, sometimes general, sometimes on a specific topic like reducing stress or dealing with anger, that you can play back while you're meditating. I have a couple I've downloaded from Audible, and there are thousands out there on YouTube (the Honest Guys have a bunch). If you want something specifically Christian, search for Guided Prayer.

- I have an app on my phone (go ahead and laugh) called the Insight Timer. There's a free version that just uses really nice bell/chime tones to start and end your session. I use it enough that I went ahead and paid for the full version, which gives you a wider variety of sounds and also allows sounds that play at an interval--say every two minutes. I like the interval sound, because if my mind has started to wander (and it always does), that reminds me to come back.

- When I first started, I would have a pen and paper next to me. If there was a thought I just couldn't let go of, I'd stop and write it down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you hear you're supposed to sit utterly still and not move a muscle, but that's way less important than being able to let go of the hamster wheel. If your nose itches, scratch it. If your foot starts to fall asleep, move it. If there's something you're afraid you'll forget while you're relaxing, write it down.

- The Buddhists say that that the mind is innately spacious. All we need to do to experience that sense of spacious, calm ease is to clear away our thoughts. I'm not sure I agree with that. In my experience, that sense of inner spacious ease is something that has to be cultivated, there's nothing inborn about it. If it were innate, that would mean that there was some pre-ordained reason we should all be meditating to reach this pre-existing state. But if it's something that has to be cultivated, it's just another possible function of the human mind. It deepens and enriches my experience, so I think it's worth doing. But I don't know that there's any pre-existing significance to a meditation practice.

- The mental whirlpool that I sometimes experience--what I've been calling the hamster wheel--sometimes takes on a life of it's own. Sometimes when I get really stressed, the whirlpool starts looking for things to obsess about. There's no longer any connection to something real in my life that I really can do something about, it becomes all about the need to feed the brain spins. In grad school, I'd be frantically worrying about a paper that was due, and when it was finally finished and turned in, instead of getting a break from the mental stress, my brain would just grab onto the next thing it could obsess about. Meditation is the one of the few things I've found that breaks that cycle. (vacation is another, but vacations aren't always an option, darn it.)

I told you last week about one of my analogies for meditation--the blinking, flashing, busy helmet that you remove so that you can spend a few minutes away from all that mental chatter. I have a new analogy. I remember when I was a kid, one time when I was swimming with my sisters I got stuck with one of those plastic inflatable rings under my armpits. It was just a little bit too small, so I was flailing around trying to push myself up out of it and getting a little panicky, because I just kept feeling more and more stuck. My older sister called out to me to put my arms straight up over my head and let myself sink down through the middle. It worked perfectly.

Meditation is sort of like that. Your brain is flailing around with all kinds of pointless activity, but if you just relax and let yourself sink down in, you free yourself from the mental trap of the whatever you're stuck in, and down you go into the cool silence of the water. Nice analogy, right?

So give it try sometime this week, and eventually I'll remember where I was going with these posts. Maybe it will be something interesting.